Ben's "Up" themed 4th Birthday Cake

I have waited for this day for many months!

For as long as I can remember, my middle son Ben, has had a complete love affair with balloons! He really does want for nothing else and asks for nothing else! He has the kindest and most innocent soul - it makes me sooo proud. He discovered the movie "Up" at the beginning of the year and needless to say we watch the movie EVERY day! Not so bad, I love it too!

I knew I would have a balloon party for Ben, no other choice really, but once Up came around, I knew it had to themed that way also! I also wanted to have a crack at making that house! (more on that later)

I also wanted to make the dessert table colourful and decided to incporate the rainbow colours. I decided to hang strands upon strands of crepe paper to look like it was a suspended rainbow. I loved how that turned out. All the treats I wanted to make rainbow and balloon orientated.

It was a family and close friends gathering only, but we had such a nice afternoon sharing fun moment and enjoying the pleasure of seeing my little boy shine!

I was also delighted to have Ben's party featured on the Amy Atlas blog today! Check it out here. The pioneer of dessert tables has shown the way to all of us. Thank you for the feature Amy!

Let's start with the table and work back!

The invitations - simple and left no doubt as to the balloon theme!

The balloons were aloft!

Loved how the balloons came out in this photo. My boy was sooooo excited with this bunch of helium filled balloons. They never left his hands. Something like this brings a tear of joy to my eyes!

Let the fun begin!

Friends to enjoy the day with !

These photos say it all

Sharing the day with Ben's beautiful little cousins, Olivia & Elan, and of course his gorgeous Aunty Tina!

What is a party without friends?!

And then there was desserts!

A table of rainbow coloured balloon delights!

The Up House.

The scale of this house is HUGE! I knew again that I would not and could not cut this cake, so decided to carve and shape from styro! Easy ... not! I felt like an architect, looking at all the different angles of the house as well as the structure. I would hazard a guess that this display cake took about 30+ hours to make! To see the look on Ben's face and every day since then, worth every single second!

I will post more pics of this house in a separate post later in the week.

Ice cream cone cupcakes.

Wanted to try something different and these definitely were. Took a while for the kids to work out what they were - the surprise was in the inside!

Sweet Treats

Rainbow sprinkled chocolate brownies, rainbow coloured macarons and vanilla whoopie pies filled with marshmallow icing.

7 layered rainbow jelly.

Love the effect and the kids hoovered these down first. All with their personalised Ben spoons.

Wooden spoons and name stamps can be purchased from the Sweet Style online store. Click here.

A last minute way to display the M&Ms. I decided to make them into hot air balloons. I just used these gorgeous wooden cups available from Sweet Style and filled them with M&Ms before adding in the balloons on sticks. Ben loved these!

The edible birthday cake and cookies.

It is no secret that I love vintage! I love the look of the rustic buttercream finish, so I made this 6 layered rainbow cake layered and covered in buttercream and simply dotted with balloons. YUMMO! Around the base were balloon bunch cookie pops for the kids as take home treats!

The beautiful Rosanna Inc cake stand can be purchased from the Sweet style online store here.

My boy, his balloons, his cake and his buddy! x

To my gorgeous boy on your 4th birthday!

We love you to the moon & back! xx

Invitations & printables by Blissfully Sweet

Photos & styling by Blissfully Sweet

All sweet treats & cakes by Blissfully Sweet

Rosanna Inc cake stand and wooden cutlery by Sweet Style

Liam's LEGO themed 8th Birthday Party

The time of year that our family always waits for - birthday season! All 3 of our boys birthdays fall within 6 weeks of one another and my eldest son Liam is the first cab off the rank!

The theme was decided almost a year ago {he is a planner}!! He really is a LEGO tragic so it really came as no surprise!

His past birthdays have been bigger affairs, but this year it was time to cut down to small numbers, so he got to invite 11 of his buddies from school. I personally loved this, as now I had the chance to focus on the small party planning details that I love so much.

I decided to try my hand at a LEGO themed dessert table and I was thrilled with how it turned out! As with everything else at the party - it was LEGO themed all the way!

One thing that I wanted to do was make this party something that was not OTT or expensive in anyway .... I think we forget they are kids and it is about them after all! So the only expensive thing on the day - was the time that I lovingly put into everything!

Have a look through now and enjoy Liam's LEGO birthday experience!

I was overjoyed and extremely thrilled to have Liam's party featured on the one and only Amy Atlas blog! See the feature here! Amy is the queen of dessert tables, so there is no higher praise! This is my first shot at a table and to have it featured ... well I feel a bit chuffed!

Lets start at the dessert table and then lets work our way back!

It started with handmade invitations. I found the Legoman mug shot image online and decided it was the perfect backdrop and insignia for the day. It worked so well that I used it for ALL my printables! Each invitation was personalised and laminated and included a special VIP tag for each guest.

The legoman welcome sign that welcomed all to our Lego Headquarters!

I love to theme everything! So I made these shirts for us. Just plain white tshirts that can be found in any store. I then made up my own labels and printed them on t-shirt transfer paper and ironed on! 10 minutes later - our own party t-shirts!

Liam, of course, was the Lego Master and was personalised with his name and "8" on the back. Ben was the Lego Apprenctice and Noah was a Lego Novice. Cannot forget about the Lego Mum also!

Now we have nice shirts as a momento of the day!

Our back entertaining area was turned into a Lego playground. All the boys got their own lego playmat and we all created our own Lego City! They had fun and worked their creative muscles also!

Boys having fun!

Onto the dessert table!

I wanted to keep the lines simple and block orientated, just like LEGO really! So to keep costs down to a minimum, I made my own display stands out of styrofoam blocks covered in bright paper. It worked a treat.

The cake!

Let me prefice this to say that the design is a Ron-Ben Israel design .... well if you are going to try and replicate, you may as well do it from THE master!

I came across the image of his cake late last year and fell in cake love as did Liam! He looked at me with big eyes and said I want THAT cake, and I thought, so do I! So, by knowing that we would only have a small party, and this is by no means a small cake, I decided to make a "faux" cake and make it from stryofoam.

In saying this ..... this cake took AGES to make! To ensure that it had the straight lines of LEGO and it all fit together - a small feat! The legoman on top is all carved and he is as shiny as a new LEGO Ninjago!

Loved this cake and now we get to look at it forever more! So we got our cake and kept it too!

Legoman cake pops. Still not perfect, but I will practice for the next 2 parties! I loved how they looked set up. I put m&ms in small glass jars and then had the cake pops in there. Each guest got their own individual jar - I think this was their favourite part!

Legoman head cookies. These cookies were given to Liam's guests as a thank you. I loved their friendly little smiles!

Continuing the legoman head theme! I stacked up my coloured styro blocks to make a cupcake tower. I kept the cupcake toppers simple, because lets face it, they look at it and then it is demolished! So the little legoman heads were simple and placed on embossed lego cupcake tops. The cupcakes were all vanilla cakes with vanilla buttercream.

Personalised drink bottles. I used my printables to embellish these little glass drink bottles. The lego power drink (apple/raspberry cordial) was the first thing they demolished and my drinks dispenser got a good workout!

Lego jelly. OK - a friend lent me her lego jelly mould and NO success! Tried first time and it all stuck, tried then to freeze it and it unmoulded fine and then defrosting - it was not pretty! So my little square ceramic dishes kind of looked like lego, so I filled these up and displayed them on different size pillars - effective! I stamped LIAM on the wooden spoons!

I made these printables for the THANK YOU chocolates. These lego treat bags are simple, but hid a little treasure inside.

Each guest got their own mini lego set, a lego mini-figure, coloured bubble set and mini-m&ms. They also took home a chocolate and a cookie.

My favourite part, the LEGO photobooth! I wanted to have something that I could take photos in front of and be able to use these as thank you to Liam's friends. They had a lot of fun taking photos ..... and there were also silly photos taken, but some of them were just plain scary!

Liam and I had soooo much fun organising his LEGO party! He really loves the details as much, or if not a little more than me!

Happy 8th Birthday my darling boy xxxxx

All printables, cake, desserts, design, shirts, decorations - made by Blissfully Sweet!

Ivory/Blue Holy Communion Cake

This Holy Communion cake was made for one of our closest friend's son who celebrated this blessed sacrament on Sunday.

Adam chose his own cake design and the colour scheme matched his shirt for the day.

The cake is a caramel mud cake with white chocolate ganache. However the top tier is also caramel mud, but is nut-free and allergy friendly.

The small celebration lunch with held at Il Goloso in the Haberfield Post Office.

Gorgeous Adam with his cake and accompanied by his brother, and my beloved godson, Christian.

Congratulations Adam and May God Always Bless you!

Monkeys & Tigers 1st Birthday Cake

Jaiden's mum fell in love with my previous monkey's cake, click here. So I modified it to accommodate their numbers as well as made a few other changes.

On top of the cake are 2 monkeys and a tiger. The monkeys represent mum and dad (their Chinese year sign) and Jaiden is a Tiger! Jaiden is severely allergic to alot of foods. The tiger is therefore sitting on top of a little cupcake especially for Jaiden. The cupcake is a dairy, gluten, egg, nut and yeast free chocolate cupcake.

The rest of the cake is chocolate cake with chocolate ganache.

Mum and Dad monkey and Tiger Jaiden on his little cupcake throne!

Cheeky monkeys

Happy 1st Birthday Jaiden!

Chakra inspired 40th Birthday Cake

I love to work with my repeat clients. It is always refreshing to get an idea and be told to "run with it".

Christine organised this cake for her sister's 40th birthday. Katrina has strong beliefs in Chakra, so ideas along this line came about. I used the beautiful bold colours of the Chakra to inspire me as well as the flowers that I had in my vase!

The cake is a gluten free orange/almond cake with white chocolate ganache.

I love the vividness of these blooms as well as their ruffled edges.

So I decided to incorporate this ruffled bloom to the cake.

The orange and pink are typical of the bold colours and the emerald green is the heart chakra colour. The piping detail is all handpainted in edible gold.

Happy 40th Katrina!

:)

Blissfully Sweet does Bandaged Bear Day 2011

March is the official month for the annual Bandaged Bear Appeal.

This year I was very pleased and honoured to be asked to be the exclusive cake supplier for Bandaged Bear Day.

This is such a worthy charity that has touched nearly every one of us in some way. What better way to put a smile on people's faces than with cakes and cookies!

So .... for the day I got busy to whip up some treats.

300+ bear paw print cookies were made (and hand decorated and individually wrapped).

250 vanilla and chocolate cupcakes (all completely nut free) all topped with handmade bear paw print toppers.

All monies raised from the sale of the cakes and cookies went directly to the Bandaged Bear Appeal.

The week of the appeal, our local newspaper the Northern District Times, ran a little story on me! Liam was very proud to see him mummy in the paper and I quickly ran out and got an arm full of copies! Best part of this was that there was even more awareness of this wonderful cause.

The newspaper article. You can read it online here.

Set up in the foyer of Westmead Children's Hospital with beautiful hospital staff selling the treats! The vanilla and chocolate cupcakes The paw print cookies.

and a Bandaged Bear for display (fondant covered styrofoam).

What a wonderful day and one that will stay with me for a while to come.

Happy Bandaged Bear Day to everyone! :o)